First Quarter Moon Face Emoji

🌛 is a half-moon in profile, right side lit, with a human face: a nose, an eye, and usually a serene half-smile. It's the fairy-tale moon, not the astronomy moon. Where 🌓 is precise and scientific, 🌛 is soft and storybook. The face makes it warm where 🌓 stays clinical.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (October 2010) as U+1F31BU+1F31B FIRST QUARTER MOON WITH FACE, it's one of four moon faces plus a sun face (🌚🌛🌜🌝🌞) that Unicode shipped together. Only the four quarter-phase moons got faces. The crescents and gibbous phases stayed blank. A small choice with big consequences: the face moons carry all the anthropomorphic weight.

Profile moon faces have been in Western illustration for centuries. Medieval manuscripts sometimes drew the moon mourning at the Crucifixion with a small, grieving face. Victorian children's books leaned into it heavily. Georges Méliès' 1902 A Trip to the Moon turned the full moon face into cinema's most iconic image, a rocket lodged in the moon's eye. The DreamWorks logo, designed by Robert Hunt in 1998, shows a boy fishing from a crescent moon in profile, which is essentially 🌛 animated.

🌛 gets used far less than 🌙 or 🌚 because its meaning is gentler and more niche. It shows up in bedtime-story content (especially for kids), sleep and wellness posts, fairy-tale or fantasy-themed captions, and as a whimsical alternative to the plain moon when the poster wants warmth. Children's publishers and parents-of-toddlers accounts use it heavily. Goodreads reviews of Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon are full of it.

It pairs especially well with 📖 (bedtime story), 🐻 (stuffed animal), 💤 (sleep), and 🎶 (lullaby). Rarely used by Gen Z for ironic or creepy purposes; that role goes to 🌚 and 🌝. 🌛 is sincere almost by default.

The man-in-the-moon is a cross-cultural pattern. In the Northern Hemisphere, lunar seas arrange into what many cultures read as a face: the Sea of Serenity and Sea of Rain form eyes, the Sea of Clouds forms the mouth, the Sea of Islands and Sea of Vapours form a nose. This is pareidolia, the same visual-recognition quirk that lets us see Jesus in toast.

European medieval and Renaissance art turned the pattern into a recurring motif. The moon appears as a face in Book of Hours manuscripts, tarot decks (the La Lune card, card 18 in the Major Arcana, draws a weeping moon face), and Renaissance allegorical paintings. Victorian illustrators leaned even harder: profile faces on crescent moons feature in nearly every 19th-century nursery book.

Georges Méliès' 1902 silent film A Trip to the Moon cemented the motif in modern visual culture with the rocket-in-eye shot, one of the most-referenced images in cinema history. In 1998, DreamWorks built its entire brand identity around a boy fishing from a crescent moon, designed by Robert Hunt and modeled on his son William. That logo plays before hundreds of millions of animated films every year. 🌛 sits in that long continuity.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (October 2010) as U+1F31BU+1F31B FIRST QUARTER MOON WITH FACE. Part of a five-member face set shipped simultaneously: 🌚 (new), 🌛 (first quarter), 🌜 (last quarter), 🌝 (full), 🌞 (sun). The five face emojis continue a long tradition of anthropomorphizing celestial bodies in Western and Eastern art. Only quarter phases got faces; gibbous and crescent phases stayed blank-faced.

1. 1902[Méliès releases A Trip to the Moon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trip_to_the_Moon). Rocket-in-moon-eye becomes the most-referenced moon image in cinema.
2. 1947[Margaret Wise Brown publishes Goodnight Moon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodnight_Moon). 40M+ copies sold. Anchors the gentle bedtime-moon aesthetic 🌛 inherits.
3. 1998[DreamWorks logo debuts](https://www.hatchwise.com/resources/the-complete-history-of-the-dreamworks-logo): Robert Hunt's crescent with a boy fishing. Becomes the modern reference image for friendly profile-moon.
4. 2010Unicode 6.0 approves U+1F31B FIRST QUARTER MOON WITH FACE.
5. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0. Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft each draw distinct profile expressions.
6. 2020Apple softens the face slightly: closed eyes and a dreamy half-smile. Confirms 🌛 as the sincere, gentle moon.

• •The 'man in the moon' is a cross-cultural pattern. Northern Hemisphere viewers see a human face in the lunar seas. Chinese mythology reads it as a rabbit making elixir. Maori tradition sees a woman named Rona. Same seas, different stories.
• •Georges Méliès' 1902 A Trip to the Moon, the first sci-fi film, centers on the iconic shot of a rocket lodged in a moon face's eye. It's been referenced in music videos (Smashing Pumpkins' 'Tonight, Tonight,' 1996), Martin Scorsese's Hugo (2011), and countless parodies.
• •The DreamWorks logo, designed by Robert Hunt in 1998, shows a boy fishing from a crescent moon. Hunt used his son William as the model. The child was placed on a small trash can during sketching.
• •Only four quarter phases got face versions in Unicode 6.0. 🌒 (waxing crescent), 🌔 (waxing gibbous), 🌖 (waning gibbous), and 🌘 (waning crescent) stayed blank. The quarter points carry all the anthropomorphic weight.
• •Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon (1947) has sold over 40 million copies. Its gentle nighttime imagery shaped what Western audiences 'see' when they see 🌛.
• •Tarot's La Lune card), card 18 in the Major Arcana, traditionally shows a weeping crescent moon face. It represents illusion, dreams, and hidden fears. 🌛 minus the tears.

• •🌛 is U+1F31BU+1F31B. UTF-8: F0 9F 8C 9BF0 9F 8C 9B. HTML entity: 🌛🌛.
• •Shortcodes: :first_quarter_moon_with_face::first_quarter_moon_with_face: (GitHub, Slack). Some systems also support :first_quarter_moon_face::first_quarter_moon_face:.
• •The Unicode name is FIRST QUARTER MOON WITH FACE, not 'first quarter moon face.' Sort order uses FIRST QUARTER.

See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.